No, he isn't God, but they've certainly got enough money to throw at this to make it stick. I would say they're off to a pretty good start too, wouldn't you? The key to establishing a platform is to make sure enough people buy it to make it self-sustainable. They now have millions of iOS devices out in the wild, so that keeps demand up.
Apple's misses have been somewhat minimized over the last few years. The last big "miss" they had was the G4 cube, and I wouldn't even really call that a miss -- just a bad call, but it really had no appreciable impact on their bottom line. The first iteration of the Apple TV was pretty lousy; the current gen, from all accounts, is selling pretty well. Their Mac division is growing year-over-year, their OS has proven it's flexible enough to make transitions between PPC, Intel, and now mobile chipsets. It's no Windows juggernaut, but it's pulling in pretty respectable numbers.
<blockquote>It just so happens that in arenas like MP3 players, phones and tablet computers, and online music stores, the options really sucked before Apple came along.</blockquote>
"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"
Can you name a "miss" that Apple has has within the last five years?